


If You Will

by gingerteaandsympathy



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, also there's a selkie, brief mention of jamie because we're in scotland and i gotta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 14:03:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19929265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingerteaandsympathy/pseuds/gingerteaandsympathy
Summary: Rose sees a flash of flipper cutting through the waves, more tawny and blunted than a shark's, but no less terrifying.She'd wanted to see so much; she never imagined seeing the Scottish seaside at the end.





	If You Will

**Author's Note:**

> I was prompted by the lovely jefflion on Tumblr to write an Eight and Rose ficlet, based on the sentence "I will if you will." I went totally off the rails and ended up rambling about Jamie, Selkies, and Scotland. Any mistakes are the result of writing late at night when I should be sleeping.

Rose Tyler rarely had cause to confront her own mortality, prior to her travels with the Doctor. There was the occasional crime spree in London, or maybe some kind of gas leak or factory explosion to remind her of the dangers. There were domestic murders on the estate, very rarely, and more often overdoses. But she'd never thought of those things — those grim harbingers of death — touching _her._

Now, she feels it, like a presence hovering just over her shoulder. More tangible than she feels the Doctor's hand in her own, more real than the low babble of his voice, is the surety of her own mortality. The fear of it claws at the inside of her chest, biting it's way up her throat, until she can no longer contain it, and she says, "We're going to die, aren't we?"

The Doctor's babble stops.

His silence leaves behind only the innocuous sound of the waves below them, crashing rhythmically against the rocky cliff-face, and the occasional scream of a gull as it soars over the inlet. The scene would even be calming, if she didn't know it for an illusion. But this is no beautiful seaside stroll. It is the grim trudge to the executioner's block.

Rose sees a flash of flipper cutting through the waves, more tawny and blunted than a shark's, but no less terrifying.

 _Therianthropic_ , the Doctor had explained, _like shape-shifters, only more gruesome. They take on thick seal-skins when they swim, and then shed the skin like snakes when they near land._

She'd wanted to see so much; she never imagined seeing the Scottish seaside at the end.

It finally begins to rain.

-

"Go on, then!" The Doctor laughed as Rose hesitated in the TARDIS doorway. Outside, the sky was overcast, incoming rain more threat than promise. The chill wind whipped in, tugging at the woolen dress Rose had hastily donned, so as not to stand out or get them arrested. Her arms tightened around herself, drawing her shawl — a great big plaid thing that the TARDIS kept putting in her eye-line — closer about her body.

The Doctor noticed her reticence and approached. "Surely — after seeing eight-legged aliens and homicidal robots and abandoned spaceships — _surely_ you aren't frightened of the Scots."

Rose shivered.

"No," she'd answered with a quick shake of her head. "S'just… that's all been the future. Different planets, different people. But this is… the past. _My_ past, in a way. I don't want to…" She looked down at her hands, clenched and unclenched them. "I don't wanna mess it up."

He stepped around her, shielding her from the wind with his proximity, and reached up to cradle her jaw. His hand — always slightly cool — should have made her shiver, but it didn't. Instead, she found herself leaning into the touch, blushing despite herself. With his thumb, he lifted her chin.

He looked down at her, and the look felt warmer than his skin. "You won't," he replied firmly. "You _won't_ mess it up. I've been traveling for a long time now, and d'you know what I'm really very good at?"

"What?"

Those blue eyes sparkled. "I'm excellent at picking companions." His smile grew. "I only take the best. Now, off we go."

He stepped aside, gesturing to the open doors, and she was almost relieved at the sudden brush of wind on her overheated cheeks.

She wanted a lifetime of this, she realized. Of playing dress-up and dancing through the cosmos and of his hands on her face. Rose couldn't help the smile that rose to meet him, or the way her rogue tongue poked out in amusement. "I will if you will."

-

_We're going to die, aren't we?_

"I'm afraid so."

His voice is quiet, unnaturally subdued. It barely carries over the sound of the crashing sea, but it strikes her as sharply as the needlepoint rain. Her hand tightens in his.

"Or, at least, the odds are not very good."

When her gaze meets his, the Doctor looks… conflicted. "The odds would be better if you weren't wearing twenty pounds of wool, and if you were a good swimmer."

She is _not_ a good swimmer. She is, at best, a barely-competent swimmer and, realistically, prone to flailing and floundering. Rose closes her eyes against the hot prickle of gathering tears, but she refuses to let them fall. Instead, she blinks them away and lets out a little snuffle of amusement. "So, not only am I gonna die, I'm gonna die looking like a floundering fool."

"I'm afraid so." That reply contains more levity than the first, and she can sense his smile, even without looking. _Good,_ she thinks, satisfied. _No need to make things worse than they are._

"Well, Doctor, I don't have a time machine, I'm afraid," that earns another little chuckle, "so I can't go back and force my mum to sign me up for those swim lessons at the YMCA. But," and she takes a steadying breath, "I can at least do something about all this _bloody_ wool."

When Rose reaches back and begins to tug on the ties of her dress, a rumble of gasps and muttering overtakes the small crowd that has amassed at her back.

For a moment, she'd forgotten she was about to be sacrificed to the sea as a form of public execution.

She blinks, and her fingers still.

"You have an audience," the Doctor says, quietly. Gently.

A smile begins to blossom on her lips. "I'll give 'em a show, then."

-

The Scottish countryside was breathtaking. Having lived most of her life within London's distinctly cluttered locale, she found the wide open spaces and unbroken expanse of sky as beautiful and foreign as any alien landscape. While they wandered through the hills, the Doctor told her what he knew about Scottish history and the war these highlanders would soon be fighting; it was all far more detailed (and interesting) than her history textbooks in school. But he spoke even more about the people, and their culture and myths, and the rugged beauty of their society.

"I had a friend, actually — a good friend — who came from this place." His eyes slid away from her, and he might have looked at the landscape. Or, perhaps, he looked inward. "We're before his time, though."

"Pity," Rose said gently. "Would've been nice to meet him."

The Doctor's velvet-clad shoulders shrugged, and sagged, as if the cloudy sky overhead pressed down on them. "He wouldn't know me, anyway. I've regenerated many times over, and the Time Lords removed most of his memories of… me. Of us."

Rose felt herself gravitating nearer, her fingers reaching out to grasp his arm. "That's cruel." And then, helplessly, "I'm sorry."

But when the Doctor met her concerned gaze, he managed to muster up a faint smile. "It's alright. It's harder, having to remember." Thunder rumbled overhead, and they both took note of the roiling clouds above them. "Now, if memory serves, the nearest village is… that way."

He was right.

She came to wish he'd been wrong.

-

Rose somehow feels more exposed in the thin, cotton shift than she ever would have felt in her usual underthings. There's no comfort in the unfamiliar garment, just the whip of cotton against her bare legs and the feeling of damp, clinging fabric everywhere else. Her bare feet are already numbing in the wet grass, and a trail of goosebumps slithers up her spine, caused as much by the Time Lord's eyes on her as by the cold rain.

Her shivers must be visible, because he draws near again, just close enough to touch.

"Alright there, Doctor?" she asks, aiming for a cheerful tone. "I hope you're appreciating this, else it's all for the selkies, and I'll not waste perfectly good underthings on _them_."

He chuckles, raising his hands to chafe at her arms. If he's hoping to warm her, he's failing. Her whole body tightens further as the chill set in, her fingers grasping uselessly at the lapels of his coat.

From behind them, a voice shouts, "Stop wastin' time and jump, else you'll get a push!"

A smile flickers at the corners of the Doctor's mouth, before rapidly being suppressed. But he can't quite prevent his eyes from glinting. "Are you ready for a leap of faith, Rose Tyler?"

"Oh, that's _shit._ That's utter shit." She laughs, breathless and relieved that he's here, with her, at the end. She leans in for a hug and a final, shaky breath of air. It smells of damp grass with a sharp tang of lightning, and like the TARDIS library, and like the Doctor. She exhales, trying to sound steady. "I'm not going out on that. Think of something better."

She feels his amused sigh in the swelling and contracting of his chest. "Tough crowd."

She tries to smile.

The Doctor steps away from her. Holds out his hand.

Her fingers lace with his, a tapestry stretching across time and space and species. She can't bring herself to regret anything, and she hopes he doesn't either.

He says, "I will if you will?"

She nods.

They run. They leap. They fly.

-

They fall.

-

Not much is known about selkies, other than what's been passed down as fiction. Creatures out of myth who have long since left us, they once possessed both human and animal forms, though the animal form was thought to be a mask, at best.

(The Doctor called it a cloaking device; Rose called him "a thief, stealing ideas from Star Trek." The Doctor asked her where she thought Paul Schneider _got_ his ideas. It was an entire argument, never again approaching the subject of selkies.)

But the fact remains that little is known about the inner lives of selkies. We know there have been many variations on these creatures — perhaps sister-species, or more likely, cousins — that existed across multiple seaside cultures, and some of those mythologies portray them as vicious. Mermaids for example, dragging men into the sea — the deepest and most abyssal grave. Or sirens, doing the same.

But selkies are largely thought to have been peaceful, dangerous only in isolation. A selkie parted from their rookery could become listless and dejected, or desperate and violent. Some say they became fiercely independent, unable to reintegrate with their bob, even if they _were_ returned to the sea. Others say that they haunted the shallows, looking to befriend human folk, and assuage their loneliness.

It's impossible to tell fact from fiction, as there's little formal documentation on the subject. And, as mentioned previously, they no longer grace our shores.

-

The force and the frigid temperature of the water must have knocked her clean out, because Rose’s first glimpse of consciousness comes on a beach, at the feeling of cold, clammy lips on hers.

The next thought is of the taste: briney and green as she coughs up salt water — buckets, it feels like.

When her eyes finally open and she blinks away the stinging, they focus immediately on the person who had just been forcing air into her lungs. It's a woman — dark-haired and doe-eyed, with the longest eyelashes Rose has ever seen.

"Where—?" Rose begins, but her throat feels raw, and she's choking, and she can barely eke out the word.

"Just there," the woman answers. Her voice is low, and clumsy, and thickly accented with a brogue that lies somewhere between ancient melody and the grinding of stones. When she raises her arm to gesture, Rose finally begins to note more detail about the woman. Namely, she is completely without clothing, with thick limbs and heavy curves, and the backs of her arms and hands are splattered in rather dark, blotchy freckles.

She is difficult to look away from, like a piece of modern art that demands all of your concentration, befuddling you into gazing too long. The patterning on her skin is distracting, along with her dreamy, deep gaze. But Rose's concern for her companion eventually pushes her upright, until she's leaning heavily on her forearms, eyes searching the shoreline.

Resting a few yards away is the Doctor, largely shrouded by a wrinkled, grey-brown blanket. She blinks. "Is he—?"

"He is safe." The woman draws closer to Rose, and despite herself, she is grateful for the body heat. "You must get warm, now that the rain has stopped. And then you must go, away from the seaside. Away from these people who do not understand you."

She finds herself looking back at the woman, whose gaze is gentle and her touch motherly. "But _you_ understand us?"

"I understand _you_. You are like me." Her fingers make quick work of the salty knots in Rose's air, deftly untangling bits of seaweed and driftwood. "You can shed your skin. There is something beneath."

Rose looks down at the soaked fabric that clings to her; it hides nothing, and she'd blush under any gaze less ethereal and distant. As it is, the woman barely notices her body. "Oh, those were just my clothes, up there on the cliff. The Doctor said they'd weigh me down, so I took them off."

"That is not what I meant," the woman replies, as if to a child. "Some say I am _selch_ with woman inside, or the reverse, an animal within a woman. It is all the same. _You_ are the same."

"I don't understand."

Carelessly, the woman shrugs. "You will, _madadh-allaidh._ I took you below the waves. You shone. Soon, you will not be able to hide the light anymore."

Rose doesn't understand a word the woman is saying, but suspects it could be blamed on her water-logged brain, or the stress of being nearly drowned and meeting what she suspects to be a shape-shifter in under an hour. As her shivers dissipate, she glances over at the Doctor, who is beginning to stir. When he moves, his covering shifts, flopping a large fin onto the sandy shore. She looks back at the woman — the selkie — in surprise. She hadn't given him a blanket; she'd given him her skin.

"Aren't you worried we'll try to take your skin?"

Rose knows the stories, that selkie skins are imbued with the source of their magic. That to take one's skin would destroy their connection to the sea, dooming them to wander over land. (She’d never believed in those stories before, not even the Doctor’s rambling explanations. Even moments ago, when she’d stood on that cliff and joked, it had just been that... a _joke_.)

(But this is, undoubtedly, a shape-shifter.)

"You cannot take what is freely given." This reply is offered with another small shrug, and a knowing smile. "But you will not take it."

Rose can't help her returning smile, coaxed out by the sudden kinship she feels with this strange, inhuman creature. "No. We won't."

A groan steals her attention, and sends her crawling toward the Doctor. "Rose?" When his eyes open, she has pulled the seal skin to the side and is hovering over him, her damp hair brushing his cheeks. He grins. "We survived! Brilliant!"

In one swift move, he's rocked upright and thrown his hand up to her cheek and pressed his lips to hers — _cool, damp, soft, briny, sweet,_ she catalogues — for just a brief moment. When he pulls back, his eyes widen, dropping to her lips as if he's just now realized what kissing is, what it's supposed to _feel_ like. His eyes shine. "Brilliant."

She thinks he might kiss her again, but she doesn't give him the chance to decide either way. Instead, her lips hurry back to meet his, and her hands tangle in his hair with such enthusiasm that he tips backwards into the sand, pulling her with him. She feels his smile against her mouth, and uses the slight parting of his lips to turn this proper kiss into a proper snog, drawing a strangled little sound from his throat.

She thinks she might burst. They've survived being shoved off a cliff by a clan of angry Scotsmen, and now they're snogging next to a shed selkie skin, while she wears an eighteenth century shift that's soaked and chafing at her like sandpaper. It's perhaps her most strangest and most uncomfortable adventure yet, and still… she's really, properly happy. Rose finds her own smile rising to meet his, interrupting the movement of their mouths, bringing laughter bubbling past her lips.

"What is it?" he asks, continuing to pepper her face with bright, ebullient kisses.

Rose bursts out in a fit of giggles. "I haven't got anything on under this thing." She also deposits kisses on him, like drops of summer rain. "And I'm freezing."

“We should get back to the TARDIS,” he manages, though not before pulling her fully down to him again. It’s as if his hands can’t keep away, as if he’s just discovered the sensation of touch, and he never wants to forget what it feels like. Her heart stutters in her chest.

“Yes, and the—,” Rose suddenly stops, remembering that they have an audience. Her head whips up, flinging little droplets of water out over the sand. But where there was once sealskin, there is only empty beach, and the soft indentations of footsteps. “She’s gone.”

The Doctor nods, slowly releasing her as he sees her gaze drift towards the waves. Rose pulls back, sits, draws her knees up to her chest. Her chin nestles in the cleft of her knees, arms wrapped tightly around the slowly-drying shift.

“Did she speak to you?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “I only saw her in the water.”

“Ah.”

They fall silent. The waves move in time with Rose’s even breaths. She suddenly feels very tired, and very small.

“Did she speak to _you_?”

“Yes. She said…” Rose hesitates. “She called me… something strange, said a bunch of stuff about light. And she said I was like her.” She blinks rapidly, struggling to say the words. “She... was a _selkie_. They’re real.”

When she meets his gaze, it’s curious and dark. Not as sparkling as before. More the burn of embers. “We should get back to the TARDIS,” he repeats, slowly.

“Yes.”

But they sit together, a little while longer, on the beach. His hand seeks her hand, and their fingers knot together as the moon rises over the water. When they return to the TARDIS, all will be changed. They will wash away the sand. The kisses must be explained — or explained away. The rough cotton will be replaced with everyday things — synthetics. And they’ll be off on the next adventure, thousands of years and lightyears away from now and here.

So, they linger awhile — let the time slip by them, while out at sea, the last selkie swims away.


End file.
